No need to rush to the doctor's office.
Good hair, strong heart?
The long-studied idea that balding men have a higher risk of heart disease gets some new support in a study out Wednesday — but experts say hair-challenged men need not rush to the doctor's office.
The study, published Wednesday in the British medical journal BMJ Open, pools results from several previous studies with inconsistent results. It concludes that the link probably does exist, but is modest — far weaker than the link between heart disease and well-known risk factors such as smoking, obesity and high blood pressure.
The findings might give balding young men one more good reason to work on reducing such known risks, says researcher Tomohide Yamada of the University of Tokyo in Japan. He responded to questions by e-mail. A bald scalp, he says, may be a "marker" for some underlying condition that contributes both to hair loss and to coronary artery disease. That could be anything from high blood pressure to high sensitivity to testosterone, the researchers speculate.
Yamada and his colleagues looked at six previous observational studies, including four done in the USA. The studies included a total of 36,990 men. On their own, four of the six studies found some statistically significant link between baldness and indicators of heart disease, such as having a heart attack or needing bypass surgery.
The researcher combined the studies in several different ways:
-- Combining three of the studies that followed men over time, for at least 11 years, they found that men who had lost all or most of their hair had a 32% greater chance of developing heart disease. The link was a little stronger among bald or nearly bald men younger than 55 or 60.
-- When they combined three other studies, which compared balding men with non-balding men at one point in time, they found balding men were 70% more likely to have heart disease. Again, the link was a bit stronger in younger men.
-- Guys with receding hairlines may have less to worry about: Studies that assessed severity found that the balder a man was at the top of his head — but not in front — the more likely he was to have heart disease, the researchers say.
But the findings don't mean guys with bald crowns should be lining up for cardiac stress tests, either, Yamada says. With baldness affecting up to 40% of the adult male population, that's not likely to be practical or good medicine, he says.
Because the analysis relies on so few previous studies, it lacks the statistical power to add much new insight about the suspected link, says J. Michael Gaziano, a cardiologist at VA Boston and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He was a co-author of the one of previous studies that found a link. In any case, he says, the findings will not change how doctors evaluate men for heart disease risk.
"We have hundreds of things that are related to cardiovascular outcomes," Gaziano says. But he says doctors can reliably estimate a man's heart risk by checking just a few very important factors, including medical history, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers. A scalp check, he says, does not add enough information to be useful.